Is accounting really boring, or has everyone else just been getting it wrong?

William Brighenti hits back at all those accountancy haters out there.

I've noticed on Twitter a bunch of tweets from younger people complaining that accounting is boring. This may very well be true for those who are not accountants. Non-accountants include those individuals who once loved accounting until they took, and were flunking, intermediate accounting in college and then switched their major to marketing, a much less challenging discipline than accounting, to say the least. I suspect that they are the main culprits spreading this libelous fiction on Twitter that accounting is boring (and, by implication, that accountants are nerds, but that is an entirely different libelous fiction, for which we in class action intend to sue).

Don't you remember when the marketing department would sponsor a Halloween fancy dress party, and would add a handwritten note at the bottom of your invitation saying, "just come as you are: you don't need a costume"? Marketing people can be so petty and mean spirited. They call themselves marketers, but we accountants know what they really are - salespeople! Don't you just hate salespeople?! Doesn't everybody hate salespeople, except salespeople? (But then, I have heard, that on occasion they are not so fond of salespeople either, especially when they find themselves the recipients of a plethora of sales calls at their dinner hour.)

There are two schools of thought as to why some individuals, when stroking a debit or a credit, experience ecstasy and others vomit before suffering a cardiac arrest. The Pavlovian Institute of Salivation Studies (aka, PISS) asserts that we love accounting because of the presence of a gene that non-accountants lack. They based their findings on a series of tests of 100 Russian female accountants with thick ankles, who both sweated and salivated while debiting and crediting all night long.

On the other hand, the Freudianists argue that there is no such gene; rather, they argue one's love or hatred of accounting stems from early childhood experiences, basing their argument on Freud's theory found in his "Masochistic Pleasure Principle", which asserts that anyone experiencing ecstasy while reading tomes of FASBs, GAASs, Regs, Codes, etc., must have experienced in early childhood both the Electra and the Oedipal complexes, resulting in a very confused, sad, miserable human being. As we all know, Freud himself was a very confused, sad, miserable human being, which explains why he was such an excellent accountant, although he kept confusing the terms debit and credit as he did the sexes and the entire civilized world for over a century; however, he did rake in millions of sheckles from all of his nutty theories as well as from all of those sexually repressed, nutty idiots who believed them, again attesting to his love of accounting.

Initially I believed that that Masochistic Pleasure Principle theory accounted for my love life in college. Women that I dated in college while pursuing my accounting degree lapsed into comas, never to be heard from again. Frankly, I found that behavior strange, if not down right rude. That Houdini phenomenon puzzled me for a very long while, thinking it was due to my cologne. But then one night while I was reading a passage from FASB 8 on a date at the drive-in, it occurred to me—after feeling a draft coming from the passenger side of the car as a result of its door being left wide open—that perhaps not everyone shared my passion for accounting. And I was right!

It was then that I came to the realisation that our love or hatred for accounting stemmed not from any Freudian psychoanalytic theory based on mommie and daddie sex—although I swear that my CPE notes on accounting and auditing have enhanced my virility much more so than that viagra that I have been taking daily for 10 years—but rather on our genetic code. After reading that earth-shattering genetic treatise, "Mein Kampf", written by a somewhat controversial Austrian social engineering theorist, who advocated genetic cleansing to the nth degree of infinity, I reached the conclusion that either you've got the good genes or you don't have the good genes. If you've got the good genes, you definitely love accounting and would never, ever find it boring. If you don't have the good genes, you are a loser and you will always find accounting and accountants boring. As CPAs, we have the good genes and therefore belong to an elite, master, Aryan race, similar to the Vulcans, of which Spock is an exemplary example as well as an excellent accountant. Do you recall that it was only Spock who counted the number of Tribbles in the episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles"? No small coincidence there.

Conclusion: Those who lack this gene are inferior to us and are in real big trouble, according to the author of "Mein Kampf", whatever his name is.

I hope that this article has shed some light on why all those morons out there in Twitter Land find accounting so boring.

I never understood why she wasn't in the car after I finished reading that FASB....However, it was not that rather uninteresting FASB No. 8, but that fascinating FASB No. 133 on derivatives. I cannot for the life of me understand why she didn't find FASB No. 133 so exciting, especially the section on yield curves?!

Yeah sure, some accountants are boring, but I've met a load of boring architects, artists, builders, lawyers, etc etc etc. Its as much about your angle on life as the job you do.

Then again, I cant say that I would find audit particularly stimulating, but horses for courses... I qualified in industry and stayed there, moving from business to business, sector to sector and have loved every minute.

I now run my own business, www.mybusinessfd.com where we have a growing team of very experienced, entrepreneurial, commercially minded FD's who support a portfolio of small but ambitious companies on a part time basis. The fromula works well for the business who cant afford, or doesn't need a full time FD and it gives fantastic variety to the FD, a better quality of life, ability to manage their work/life balance and they no longer have all their eggs in one basket (a big advantage in this economy!). If one of their businesses fail than they have another half a dozen others that are still fine and we'll just find them another to fill the slot.

Infact we're still on the lookout for more of us to join up, so if you're not one of the so called 'boring' ones, get in touch with us.

Yah, ve accountants are the Master Race! Ve are the most qualified individuals to be in charge of others. Ve are better budget analysts, better revenue agents, better dancers than our present leaders. Yah, dis is true. My great grandfather, Adolf, vas a great dancer. He vas a much better dancer than Churchill. Yah, Churchill could valtz, but he could not jitterbug!